


Break Out the Bone Saws

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (kickass) mourning, Episode: s02e01 A Scandal in Belgravia, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Molly channels Sherlock, Pining John, Post Reichenbach, Women Being Awesome, guns & knives & grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:53:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's never pistol-whipped a man before.</p>
<p>Molly Hooper does it like a (man). Well a certain one anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Break Out the Bone Saws

**Author's Note:**

> for [Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion) and [ stitching](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard), fierce and fiery. Written while caffeinated.

 

Molly’s never pistol-whipped a man before, not even in her dreams. When it happens it's satisfying, not like tossing some sad tosser out of a window satisfying, but still.

He was a rapist; she knows he was, a gutter-licking piece of shit who'd sooner…  

“You’ve seen these before, these double-cheeked bruises,” says Sherlock.

“You’ve seen a lot of injuries, have you,” says Sherlock, “but you’ve never killed yourself.”

 He's dead and there's no denying it, but he grins at her, lunatic, pats her gun hand.

Well bloody hell she's been toting him around the wrong way and isn't it just like him to let her in on it.

Bastard.

*******

Of course it's a dream.

She’s had others, mortifying ones in which she and Sherlock live in a world of tricksters and getaways and hideouts and little seaside towns with shacks and moonlight and takeaway.

Or mournful ones in which she’s bundling him in her lab coat, pristine, healing him, calming him in a way he’s never calmed before, fucking him, still warm with fever, letting her mouth rest, shocked, on the sharp plane of his freckled shoulder.

None of that mattered when he thanked her and slipped from her and she thought she'd carry him in a certain kind of vessel but it doesn’t fit and that’s the end of it.

Bespoke, she thinks, snorts into her pillow, strokes her gun hand.

Three dark hairs on the table when he died. What it feels like to kill a man.

Or help him kill himself.

*******  
She's always said too much.

Before coffee.

*******

Guns. Blades. Chemistry.  A collar.  She eats a yoghurt, cherry, drags out the old coat, the street-length one she’d forgotten because she never wears but shaken out is perfect, pulls it on, turns the collar up with the dream buzzing through her blood like the pills she used to run on at uni, that ones that set off arrythmias and much …

Well, running off of the mouth.

 “Hello there,” she says to the mirror, “piss off.” (How would she look with darker hair, then, a darker shade of everything.)

“You can fuck right off,” she says to her reflection. “Thinking.” Look at those cheekbones. The collar hits the scalenes like cool hands. Cool, not cold. Molly Hooper, the temperature of the recently deceased. Smooth.

*******

The day is from Hades.

Coffee, Molly.

A body brought in; another; can you stay late then; you can.

More coffee, Molly.

Piss off I'm working. Her lipstick is Deduction. (What color is deduction anyway, blue blue blue, no grey. Relentless but still as water.)

She skips lunch, fires up, slices, snips, catalogues, snaps out a few lines, doesn’t blink, not nearly as much as she used to.

*******

She may always have said too much but in the end she said the right things to Sherlock Holmes.

And that not many can claim.

*****  
** No, Molly says to someone on the phone, _no you can't come over and sleep on my sofa because you need help._

Are you kidding, Molly says to someone else.

She doesn’t add just kidding.

The elder Holmes might turn up with another faceless siren. It’s that kind of day.

But now, but now.

She might tell Mycroft to sod off, go back to her body.

Bodies.

*******

He burst into the morgue once, Sherlock, tumbling like an entire flock of crows, calling, “Molly, a bone saw!”

She thinks she gave him one.

Later she caught him smoking and begged a puff (his lips) before she made him put it out.

***

On the Tube, homeward, vibrating with exhaustion, she thinks the young man next to her has recently lost his girlfriend (who’s not a  ginger but he thinks she is) and is questioning his sexuality to the tune of seven years’ worth of coke a week.

It surprises her how it feels, deduction, both soft and wicked as an edge.

Sweet.

*******

The coat’s doubled beneath her like a pillow.

Home.

Ah, John, she thinks, couldn’t say what you needed could you. Couldn’t do.

She knows couldn’t do, knows love without resolve, grey-eyed unrequition her companion a long time. (Since school really, since she fell for and fell again.)

Since, though. Well, things are different now.

John, my darling.  Anyway, John.  Put your grief where it  belongs. Use it for good.  Heal the fucking world. Love everyone. Turn a few heads with your pronouncements. Kick in a few doors for love.

Go on. Yeah?

*******

Sherlock’s pulse was a snipped thing under her hand.

Sherlock, hurry, you’ve got to go, everything clicking into place sharp.

Oh.

When the dead love one another it’s problematic.  She thought it was all elegy but no.

He came tumbling into the morgue, smiling.

Break out the bone saws.

You see me, he said.

It was enough.

*******  
It’s harder when she sees John.

He’s not going to break but he is. That's the thing. When you don't admit you need you can't grieve like you needed. Yeah?

All these things you can't say.

Did you want that too John, run with him, wrap him in your coat, save him. Did you want what I did, lips on a warm shoulder.

“Well,” Greg said to her once, “this is going to take several lifetimes.”  And she smiled, sad, because she’d seen what he meant months ago.  John you silly bastard, I can't start in with you, the rescues, different ones, safer, not so on-the-lam.

Their coffee is bitter, thinner than blood and she’s never really liked it.

"Doing fine," John says, “You?”

Oh. Like that then. Her cheekbone this morning in the mirror, fresh as a man’s razor.

She wants to give him an infusion of this, this green tea fucking dark-haired bloody manic ice-green caffeine shot straight to the cerebral cortex across the blood-brain barrier fuck you I’m thinking fuck you energy.

That’s the way you live for him, with him, she thinks, love him until he’s back.  That’s it. Backhand yourself with proof of life.

She can see through him hard and sure, but not yet; not yet.

Stun one man and kill another and that’s a sure thing.

Her hand settles on John’s shoulder, a blade she can’t speak, cuts silent and true.

**Author's Note:**

> “She waited until it was late… and then she walked in
> 
> out of the moonlight, smiling.”—D.Mainwaring, “Out of the Past”, 1947


End file.
